The SOHP Symposium on April 24, 2025, at UNC Chapel Hill. Photos by Roberto Hernandez.
Event Recap: 2025 SOHP Spring Symposium Celebrating the LDF Oral History Project
On April 24, 2025, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) Archives team and the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill co-hosted a symposium celebrating and highlighting the LDF Oral History Project. The symposium featured two panel discussions, a keynote conversation with past and present LDF leaders, and a reception. The event strengthened the collaboration between LDF and SOHP, introduced the Oral History Project to students and community members in the Chapel Hill area, and generated new ideas for sharing and activating LDF’s oral histories and Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive.
“Documenting the Good Fight” panel
SOHP Symposium, April 24, 2025 at UNC Chapel Hill.
Photos by Roberto Hernandez.
In the first panel session, “Documenting the Good Fight: How LDF Stories Are Selected, Collected, and Preserved,” project colleagues Kimberly Villafuerte Barzola, Melody Hunter-Pillion, Phillip MacDonald, Cassandra Mensah, Jesse Paddock, and Susie Penman discussed the ins and outs of collecting and preserving vital stories in LDF’s ongoing fight for civil rights over the past 85 years.
“History Is a Call to Action” panel
SOHP Symposium, April 24, 2025 at UNC Chapel Hill.
Photos by Roberto Hernandez.
The second panel session, “History Is a Call to Action: Building the Record and Imagining the Future,” focused on different methods and possibilities for leveraging LDF’s rich history to defend past gains and create a more just future. Interdisciplinary panelists Leah Aden, Jack Boger, Renée Alexander Craft, Kayla Jenkins, Danita Mason-Hogans, and Karla McKanders shared their own experiences with and ideas for activating history in courtrooms, classrooms, creative works, and community organizing.
Keynote conversation between Janai Nelson and Theodore Shaw
SOHP Symposium, April 24, 2025 at UNC Chapel Hill.
Photos by Roberto Hernandez.
The symposium culminated in a keynote conversation between LDF President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson and Theodore M. Shaw, the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law at UNC School of Law, Director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, and former LDF President and Director-Counsel. Meredith Clark, a former journalist and current UNC Hussman School of Journalism Professor, facilitated the conversation.
During the keynote conversation, Nelson said, “If we are learning anything from this moment, it is that we have got to be able to rely on ourselves to tell our own stories. That is why it is so important that at the Legal Defense Fund, we’re preserving our own history and that of the movement generally because we’re not subject to the whims of any administration, any political moment. We understand the value of our history and we will preserve it as such.” She continued to say that stories of “extraordinary accomplishments against impossible odds” are “lessons you don’t want to teach a people that you are trying to subdue and subjugate. You don’t want them to know that they can use the institutions that were created for their own oppression to liberate not only them but an entire country. And that’s what this history tells you—it’s what it teaches you, it’s what it inspires in you and compels you to want to do on your own. And that’s why that history is so dangerous.”
